Hatred Is So Much Closer To Love

[i] Learned ... That Friends Are A Good Source Of Food And Soul When One Has Not Yet Gotten The Hang Of Cooking Or Living (as Opposed To Dying) Alone. That Nothing-not Booze, Not Love, Not Sex, Not Work, Not Moving From State To State-will Make The Past Disappear. Only Time And Patience Heal Things. I Learned That Cutting Up Your Arms In An Attempt To Make The Pain Move From Inside To Outside, From Soul To Skin, Is Futile. That Death Is A Cop-out. I Tried All Of These Things.

You Never Come Back, Not All The Way. Always There Is An Odd Distance Between You And The People You Love And The People You Meet, A Barrier Thin As The Glass Of A Mirror, You Never Come All The Way Out Of The Mirror; You Stand, For The Rest Of Your Life, With One Foot In This World And No One In Another, Where Everything Is Upside Down And Backward And Sad.

Never, Never Underestimate The Power Of Desire. If You Want To Live Badly Enough, You Can Live. The Great Question, At Least For Me, Was: How Do I Decide I Want To Live?

In Her Presence, I Was Reminded Again Of Why I Was An Anoretic: Fear. Of My Needs, For Food, For Sleep, For Touch, For Simple Conversation, For Human Contact, For Love. I Was An Anoretic Because I Was Afraid Of Being Human. Implicit In Human Contact Is The Exposure Of The Self, The Interaction Of The Selves. The Self I'd Had, Once Upon A Time, Was Too Much. Now There Was No Self At All. I Was A Blank.

When You Are Mad, Mad Like This, You Don't Know It. Reality Is What You See. When What You See Shifts, Departing From Anyone Else's Reality, It's Still Reality To You.